Challenging Faith
By John A. McKenzie
Fremantle Arts Centre Press. 166 pp. $16.95
Reviewed by Catherine Brown
Challenging Faith is a personal account from one of the thousands of people who joined the Communist Party of Australia in the late 1930s. The book ends when he leaves the party 20 years later.
McKenzie gives a vivid description of life as a child in rural Australia in the early part of this century. The small towns, one-teacher schools, the dust and the freedom of the bush are insights into a world few now experience.
After an upbringing dominated by the austere Protestant church, university and the tumultuous 1930s radicalised McKenzie, inspiring him to join the CPA. "Part of the appeal of Marxism for me was its lack of respectability", he explained.
McKenzie talks of his "religious zeal" when he first joined the CPA and likens A Handbook of Marxism to "the bible of our times". The religious comparisons are somewhat laboured, belittling McKenzie's own commitment for 20 years to a struggle for social change.
In fact, the introduction reveals the moral of this book. McKenzie "did not see that he was only substituting one faith for another." He concludes by quoting Bertrand Russell: "The worst of all evils in human affairs is dogmatism — of whatever kind". Is this merely a reflection on life in the Stalinised CPA? Maybe. But it appears that for McKenzie there is an equals sign between Marxism and Stalinism.
Nevertheless, the chapters covering the CPA through the 1930s and 1940s are a part of Australia's history not covered in our schools, and are particularly interesting: long before the McCarthyite period, the censorship of books, radio, films and papers were strictly enforced by the Australian government.
In 1940 the conservative Menzies government in the National Security Act introduced censorship — there was no provision for appeal to the courts and no proof was required to establish that a publication was "communist" and therefore banned. Communist publications, plant, equipment and stock were seized by the government. The only radical publications to escape the axe were those of the most powerful unions: the railways, the miners, the waterside workers and the ironworkers.
On June 15, 1940, the CPA was declared illegal. The police raids on CPA members' and suspects' houses became known as "the Blitz" in radical circles. McKenzie gives a lively account of "the vindictiveness and ignorance of some of the police agents involved".
"'Poetical Works' were seized in the belief they were 'Political Works'. Books by authors with foreign sounding names like Ibsen, Flaubert and Dostoevsky, even books with red covers, were taken." The Council for Civil Liberties, a broad committee, initiated a campaign against the seizures. Even the Sydney Morning Herald joined the outcry against the raids.
The CPA in McKenzie's day had a vitality and enthusiasm it lacked in its final years. McKenzie reflects, in his final chapter, on his commitment and CPA activity as an "exhilarating experience ... shared with a hundred thousand Australians of my generation".
"The problem of achieving fair distribution of wealth produced by society still remains", acknowledges McKenzie in his conclusion. That's why books like this still have an interest beyond the merely historical.